Often, the value of design can be best measured by the cost avoided by *not* developing a product that the customer's don't want. In this case, One Sprint Beyond helped our client avoid a very costly mistake.
Challenge
As part of their normal business operations, a national provider of waste & recycling solutions captured vast data for their customers. For some customers, they bundled this data into a self-service portal. These customers reported that their portals provided valuable insights into their waste stream output and costs, and environmental impact. Might the portal be valuable to a new type of customer– one who did not use the client's services to haul their waste? The company faced the following challenges:
- Unclear Market Demand
- Unclear Product Readiness
- Unclear Target Market
Key Recommendations
Re-design, re-brand, re-build, and re-release
the Portal for vendor-managed clients
to correspond with the release of
the new CORE backend.
- Improve Utility by understanding client needs
- Improve Usability and Desirability through design
- Explore Vendor’s appetite to provide more data
- Focus on Integration, not Replication
- Productize the Portal to ensure success
Approach
To address their challenges, One Sprint Beyond implemented a comprehensive design strategy focused on evaluating product-market fit, understanding customer needs, and refining the user experience. The approach involved four core phases:
- Define the Vision
- Assess the Current State
- Develop the Communications Plan
- Test the Market
Phase 1: Define the Vision
The first step was to build a common understanding among the stakeholders of the solution they envisioned. We facilitated a workshop at corporate HQ with key stakeholders. At the session, we defined and prioritized features and capabilities of this solution, refined specific value propositions for specific potential buyers and users, and understood the solution's relationship with competitive offerings in the market today.
Phase 2: Assess the Current State
We individually interviewed a comprehensive set of twelve (12) internal stakeholders to validate what we learned during the visioning session.
We performed a heuristic evaluation of the current portal to discover whether its usability aligned with UX best practices.
We developed a comprehensive set of recommendations based on our findings.
Strengths
- Real customers using a real operational prototype
- Portal valued by vendor-managed clients
- Provides data visibility in client-specified slices
- Deep knowledge of N. American vendors and compliance reporting requirements
Weaknesses
- Portal is heavily customized for each client
- Portal requires monthly manual manipulation
- Portal is not user-friendly.
- Integration / APIs are one-off and brittle
Opportunities
- In 2-5 years, small businesses will need this as much as public companies do today.
- Data availability and data integrity is everyone’s #1 challenge
- SEC wants to protect against greenwashing
- Compliance reporting is complicated- specific to country, state, county, and even municipality.
Threats
- Getting and cleaning data will remain difficult
- Competition offers international compliance reporting.
- Waste Data is a small part of ESG and Sustainability reporting
- Safety and Health take precedence of Environmental (EHS)
Phase 3: Develop a Communications Plan
Armed with the SWOT analysis of the current state, we developed a communications plan that
- segmented the audience based on roles within the target companies and the size of the company (which dictated their regulatory requirements).
- defined the most appropriate channels to reach each segment (email, linkedIn DMs, linkedIn ads)
- created and internally validated marketing messaging for each segment
- developed a website landing page to track engagement that included a webform
Working collaboratively with
Phase 4: Test the Market
- developed and implemented an email (~300) and linkedin (~41,000) market campaign
- directly invited executives to interview via linkedIn messages
- reported results to the client monthly for six months
About the Client
- Headquarters Dallas, Texas | NASDAQ listed
- Market Cap ~ $175 MM | TTM Revenue ~ $275 MM**
- Solutions offering helps customers meet business efficiency, sustainability and ESG Goals
- Serving $200B+ North American waste and recycling industry
- Expertise with 100+ waste streams
- Nationwide footprint: delivers services in every zip code in the U.S.
